The iSquare team has been very busy! In early November, Dr. Jenna Hartel and the iSquare team represented the University of Toronto at the ASIS&T (Association for Information Science and Technology) 78th Annual Meeting: Information Science with Impact: Research in and for the Community, which took place in St. Louis, Missouri. Our Visualizing Information Worldwide panel session gave us a chance to report emergent findings from our study of visual conceptions of information across 12 countries.

Over the summer of 2014, the iSchool and collaborators from Australia, Brazil, Croatia, England, Finland, France, Ghana, Iran, Malaysia, Russia, and Taiwan, explored visual conceptions of information. They asked the question, “How is the concept of information visualized in my community and beyond?” To answer this question they used the draw-and-write technique. iSquares were collected from graduate students at 12 information studies programs worldwide. The data was meticulously organized and accessioned by Data Coordinator and MI program graduate, Stephanie Power. In seven cases the exercise was conducted in English, and at five sites it was presented in another first language, namely Farsi, Spanish, French, Russian, or Croatian. In total, 541 iSquares from around the world were created.

Back in Toronto, the iSquares were analyzed through a content analysis, spearheaded by MI student and the team’s research manager,Dr. Pavel Danzanov. The process identified common visual motifs related to humanity and sociality, information behaviours, information representation and organization, information and communication technologies, and print artifacts.

During the conference, there was a beautiful on-site exhibition of the 541 international iSquares, designed by PhD student/artist-in-residence Rebecca Noone and funded by ASIS&T’s Special Interest Group for International Information Issues. MI student Bridgette Kelly, the Social Media Manager for the study, live tweeted the panel and engaged with the broader research community in-person and by answering audience questions via social media.